About Animal Immorality and AmoralityAn Animal Rights Article from All-Creatures.org

FROM

I believe this stance also applies to the great cultural evils of the
exploitation and killing of animals. Many compassionate persons who devoted
their lives to, e. g., campaigns to end war, heal the sick, or to feed and
empower the hungry, never gave a thought to the blood on their plates.

Rex the dog rescued pulled this kangaroo joey out of his dead mother’s
pouch and carried him gently to his human, Leonie Allen; he and the orphan
cuddled together. The baby was raised at a wildlife sanctuary and later
released. See
Joey Tale.

It is often said that animals don’t know the difference between right and
wrong, that they are amoral. It is true that there are cases from the Middle
Ages of animals being put on trial, convicted, and executed for attacking a
human being, but most people today would reject that idea, holding rather
that they are not responsible.

For example, I am right not to blame or
punish my much-beloved (and well fed) cat-friend Taliessin for catching a
ground-squirrel and carrying her or him into our house this morning with
clear intent to kill and devour. It is obvious to us that he is unable to
imagine the squirrel’s terror, empathize with her, and forbear accordingly.
(My spouse and I rescued his intended victim, considering that, as a
companion animal, Tali won’t suffer from hunger as a result; for humans to
interfere in cases of wild predation is a more complex issue I won’t explore
here.)

But that all animals are amoral all the time is not as clearly
established as people once thought. Ethologist Marc Bekoff, author of Wild
Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals (co-authored with philosopher Jessica
Pierce) shows that there are numerous examples of moral behavior in animals.
The authors categorize it into three clusters: the Cooperation, the Empathy,
and the Justice clusters. For an animal to be moral is: to behave with due
regard for others, and to fulfil her or his responsibilities to them
(Cooperation), to empathize with and help them when disadvantaged (Empathy),
and/or to treat them fairly, observing agreed-upon rules and thus refusing
to take advantage of them (Justice).

Bekoff and Pierce give numerous well-documented examples of animals,
principally mammals, acting in accordance with this definition of morality;
other instances are on record elsewhere.

One can find accounts of great apes who work together to achieve common
goals, as in a human-devised experiment when a chimpanzee had to find a
partner, unlock her cage door and invite him in, and work together in order
to pull a tray of food within reach that was inaccessible to only one; there
are also instances of spontaneous cooperation to achieve a goal. It is now
well known that elephants and apes show clear signs of grief at the death of
companions, and that elephants hold wakes; animals who help others in their
social group, with no immediate benefit to themselves, though those who help
others are more likely to be given help later.

Rats have acted
altruistically, releasing another rat from a cage and sharing chocolate-chip
treats with her, or refusing to press a lever that would yield them a food
treat if they have seen that it would cause an electric shock to another
rat. Similarly, rats will often turn their back on chocolate chips in order
to save a companion who is in distress treading water.

What if such an animal fails to act altruistically? Is a rat who declines
to release the caged rat and chooses to eat all the chocolate chips herself
rather than share them acting immorally? We can’t say. But among so-called
pack animals--or perhaps we should say “family pack animals”--who cooperate
in hunting, such as wolves, immoral behavior does seem to appear. From long
observation Bekoff concludes that wolves have agreed-upon rules in certain
intra-family situations. An important instance: when one family member
invites another to play with the gesture called the “play bow,” any biting
must be pretend-only; sexual gestures must be pretend-only. A wolf who
repeatedly invites another to play and then seriously aggresses or rapes is
violating such rules, and will be ostracized by the family. In so doing, the
other family members are of course protecting themselves, but that could
also be achieved by just refusing her or his invitations to play. The
family’s action seems to show they hold that he or she “knew better” and
failed to act rightly.

There are impressive cases of animals such as Rex mentioned above who
behave morally by showing compassion to animals (including humans) of other
species, and of animals engaging in play morally, obeying the rules, with
non-prey animals of another species; this is commonplace among companion
animals, such as cats and dogs who live together. It happens even among wild
animals, as in the case of polar bears who played with chained husky dogs.

But can animals interact immorally with those of another species? With
prey animals? As with Tali and the ground squirrel, wolves who act morally
within their own family packs apparently cannot imagine and empathize with
the feelings of prey animals, and their hunting actions are thus amoral.

About Human Immorality, Amorality

The terms “immoral” and “amoral” when applied to humans have often become
confused among educated people in the humanities, at least in the
literary-critical circles I am familiar with. “Immoral” has come to be so
closely associated with sexual violation of certain traditional rules, that
in many cases writers have stopped using it and substituted “amoral,”
without questioning whether or not the person deemed amoral was actually
incapable of imagining the feelings of others and empathizing with them.
(The character Lady Susan in the current Jane Austen movie Love and
Friendship is an example; she has many signs of psychopathy, and
psychopaths, though they can imagine the feelings of others enough to
manipulate them, appear to be devoid of all empathy.) Without delving
further into this absorbing topic, I will simply state that in what follows
I am applying “moral” and “immoral” to humans in the same sense as above to
animals: moral behavior is responsible, compassionate, and fair treatment of
others.

There is, unhappily, no need to ask whether human beings act immorally
among themselves at times, taking advantage, bullying, abusing, violating,
killing other humans. The matter is enormously complex, and obviously we can
make only a few comments within these space limitations. In one way it
resembles the situation among pack family animals, in that for many people,
perhaps most, abusive behavior that is immoral in regard to members of one’s
own family, tribe, ethnic group, nation, race, or sex, may be considered
amoral or even morally admirable in regard to other families, tribes, ethnic
groups, nations, races, sex.

Sometimes boundaries hold for centuries, while
in others they may shift fairly quickly, with one generation’s national
enemy becoming the next generation’s friend, and vice versa. In times of
widespread anxiety and/or scarcity, demagogues can promote fear, exclusion,
and/or violence toward other groups previously tolerated to some degree, as
the present political situation in the US shows all too well. Often God is
enlisted as willing, even commanding aggressive war against the targeted
group. Examples can be found in the biblical book of Joshua, in the medieval
Crusades, and in the wars of European invaders and colonists against Native
Americans.

Are people who never consider questioning their group’s evils in fact
behaving amorally when they participate in or profit from them? There is no
simple answer to this question; there may be many degrees of responsibility,
ranging from the deliberate cruelty of some 18th-century slavers to the
unthinking quasi-innocence--something akin to amorality--of a purchaser of
mainstream-brand chocolate today, unaware of the slavery involved in its
production. Things change when occasionally prophetic figures appear who do
challenge the prevailing cultural evils: an eighth-century BCE Amos of Tekoa
who preaches against exploitation of the poor by the powerful, a Francis of
Assisi who opposes abuse of the poor and tries to stop the Fifth Crusade, a
Lucretia Mott who speaks out against human slavery, the oppression of women,
and mistreatment of Native Americans. But once the challenge has been heard,
unquestionably those who ignore or try to stifle it--such as the later
churchmen who, in order to better promote further crusades, suppressed the
story of Francis’ 1219 journey to speak peace with Sultan Malik
al-Kamil--are behaving immorally.

I believe this stance also applies to the great cultural evils of the
exploitation and killing of animals. Many compassionate persons who devoted
their lives to, e. g., campaigns to end war, heal the sick, or to feed and
empower the hungry, never gave a thought to the blood on their plates. Even
Francis, who loved his animal sisters and brothers and would never have
harmed them himself or ordered his friars to do so, ate their flesh when it
was given to him.

Graham Faulkner as Francis in Zefferelli’s Brother Sun, Sister Moon

At the same time, however, his view of animals (and the rest of creation)
as our sisters and brothers implies a basic respect for them as coming from
the same divine Parent as ourselves--a view which provides the ground for an
eventual social and spiritual awakening to end their exploitation among
Christians and any others who hold Brother Francis in honor.

Certainly there is a greatly increasing awareness of these evils in our
culture today, making those who have heard the critique but ignored or tried
to suppress it guilty to a degree that their oblivious grandparents were
not. We must remember, though, that although some people awaken and act
quickly, others may take months or years--even decades-- after hearing it
(as I myself did). Rather than condemn, we do better by the animals if we
maintain faith in the Divine Light in each slow-responding human, and
encourage them to follow it.

Fair Use Notice: This document, and others on our web site, may contain copyrighted
material whose use has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owners.
We believe that this not-for-profit, educational use on the Web constitutes a fair use
of the copyrighted material (as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law).
If you wish to use this copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond fair use,
you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.